With a unique layout that prioritizes engaging visuals, Pinterest is the perfect platform for inbound marketing.
Why bother with Pinterest?
Shame on you for even asking.
Pinterest is an ideal platform for advertising, as it’s based on one of the cornerstones of quality inbound marketing: visual content. We all know how engaging visual content is, and Pinterest knows it too.
Pinterest reached over 100 million users last year. Its user base is surprisingly mixed for a platform so young—the data shows that 37 percent of users are aged 18-29, with users aged 30-49 adding 36 percent more. This means that almost two-thirds of Pinterest’s users are in the much sought-after Millennial population, making it the perfect platform for business marketing.
Check out the Pinterest for Business page—signing up gives business owners access to several cool features, including the ability to put prices on items pinned from your site and alerts that notify customers of pricing changes. This type of marketing automation is valuable for any brand and is just the tip of the iceberg of the value that Pinterest offers.
Pinterest’s layout is inherently friendly to inbound marketers looking to gather customer data. User boards showcase a cross section of interests alongside what type of content they like to repost. Data like this is critical for tailoring buyer personas and content proper to align with each user’s unique interests and send engagement through the roof.
And if that wasn’t enough to seal the deal, Pinterest is new enough that sponsored content doesn’t have that “advertising” vibe that scares customers off. Visual content is inherently approachable and easy to digest; businesses advertising on Pinterest appear more casual, making it easier to connect with consumers.
Must Know Strategies for Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest ain’t your grandma’s social media site. Marketing on Pinterest requires some specific tactics inherent to the platform—chiefly, the ability to create solid visual content, master keyword captioning, and leverage the power of pinning.
Creative Content
Inventive content is a must on Pinterest. Unlike on other platforms where your visual content stands out, all content on Pinterest is visual. Translation: you have to work that much harder to get your content noticed. Your content marketing strategy should include engaging imagery, infographics, and videos that are likely to get re-pinned. Research compiled by Jeff Bullas found that tutorials, guides, and DIY-types of posts saw 42 percent higher click rates than other types of pins.
Data by Piqora
Become a Pinning Pro
Understanding the virtues of pinning is critical for successful Pinterest marketing. Unlike Facebook’s posts or Twitter’s tweets, Pinterest pins march to the beat of a different drum.
- According to Piqora, a Pinterest pin reaches 50 percent of its total engagement 3.5 months after its initial pin. Compare this to Facebook posts that reach 50 percent engagement after 90 minutes, or Tweets clocking in at a mere 24 minutes.
What does this mean for your content? As one pin’s engagement lasts nearly 1,680 times longer than a Facebook post’s, Pinterest is a great platform for evergreen content and material that delivers value over time.
- Promoted Pins: Much like how Facebook offers paid promotion options for its posts, Promoted Pins give businesses on Pinterest ways to boost content visibility. With Promoted Pins, you can select which posts to promote, delineate specific targeting of who sees it, and whether to pay for engagement based on post clicks or site visits.
- Pin-it Button: Content traffic isn’t a one way street—just as you drive traffic from your social media to your site, you should give site visitors an easy way to view your Pinterest content. Don’t forget the Pin-it button (and other social media APIs!) on your website.
Keyword Captioning
As search engines don’t index words contained in images, photo captions are one of the few ways to tell Pinterest what your pins are actually about. This is critical for Pinterest’s content categorization system and improving content visibility overall. Use focused keywords in image captions. Not only will this help your content during search engine indexing, but users who find your content through targeted keyword searches will be more likely to click through the path to conversion.
Unlocking the Power of Pinterest
Above all else, marketers on Pinterest should keep one concept in mind:
Hang loose!
Pinterest is still making its way in the social media world, and while best practices like original content and targeted keyword captioning are important, there’s certainly room for experimentation. Take advantage of the laid-back atmosphere on Pinterest to try out new content marketing strategies like contests and special promotions that your competition may not have thought of.
If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, then the wealth of content available on Pinterest is worth quite a bit indeed.
